Okay, my favorite part invoicing, let's say you finish the job, you did it in one of those ways that we talked about before, whether it was an ISDN session or you email back and forth or what you did a few pickups, and now the client has approved the job. So it's time to send an invoice, it's time to build them. There's lots of different ways you can do this. I've done them all. So let me tell you about a few of them. When I first started, I just took like an invoice that I had sent from some other contract work that I had done, copied it, changed it around to work for voiceover and then I kept it either in Google Docs or a Word document and I would just copy and paste it every time.
And then, you know, make the changes as necessary for each client and send it off. That's the cheapest way. And it's easy, but it's also sometimes hard. You have to set up your own like tracking system to see what invoices are out what invoices you're waiting on, and everything else. Eventually the work gets to be enough where you can justify having some invoicing software. So I've used fresh books, I've used QuickBooks Online.
I view well with voices.com. You don't even send an invoice they just approve the work and then it's the funds are just released to your PayPal account. So no invoice has to happen. My favorite now is QuickBooks Online. There is a little bit of a charge that you do have to deal with every month that just bugs the heck out of me. Because I don't want to pay anything.
I just want to collect the money but it's so much more convenient. I don't have to To track things down anymore, it syncs with all of my bank accounts, I can just basically call my accountant and they log into that same QuickBooks Online account and everything is itemized and figured out. So taxes are so much easier every year. It's just it monitors my invoicing and it monitors my money at the same time. And so it's much more worth it to me. And yeah, I'd recommend it, but not until your business is at a certain level where you can justify the cost.
It's about 20 bucks a month, but there's all kinds of hidden fees and maybe start out by just using a template just use an invoice that I have included a PDF of below and copy and paste it and fill in the stuff that works for you and, you know, go from there. But the last thing I will say is if you use that system in the beginning, keep a spreadsheet of invoices that are out so that you can monitor when are overdue and when they're not, if you don't track that stuff, it's really easy to do a bunch of jobs and then for some to slip through the cracks and just to forget about or to forget that they never paid it or forget that she never sent the invoice or whatever, it's good to have some kind of tracking system even if it's a manual one the most common way that I get paid as I send an invoice to the client, and then they send me a check in the mail within 30 days.
Other ways that I get paid are via PayPal and QuickBooks Online. I can take credit cards with both of those By the way, direct deposit and wire transfer, direct deposit and wire transfer are the quickest way to be paid and direct deposit has no fees. Direct Deposit is usually only set up with long term clients and wire transfers are usually only set up with bigger international clients. And then PayPal is great too. I mean, I've used it for so many years and you should do if you don't have a PayPal account, you do kind of need one to get by these days with online Work. Once I had like a PayPal debit card, it became convenient before that having to transfer the money to your bank account.
It takes three to four days made it a lot less convenient and more of a hassle for me, but now I get paid just as often with PayPal as anything else. So those are the three ways that you can really collect your money the most efficiently and conveniently.